Behavioral Loyalty and Attitudinal Loyalty
Introduction
In the marketing literature, loyalty has been widely recognized as being of the utmost importance. The marketing literature is concerned with both the conceptual definition and measurement of loyalty. Customer loyalty describes the tendency of a customer to choose one business or product over another for a particular need. Loyal customers are less price sensitive and lower costs are incurred by the provider as the expense of pursuing new customers is reduced. It is commonly accepted in the marketing discipline that it is far cheaper to retain an existing customer than it is to attract a new customer. In other words, customer loyalty is of great value to an organization because loyal customers are much cheaper to serve and their support easier to maintain (T.S.Kuo, C.M.Chang, K.M.Cheng, 2004).
Loyalty has, over the past decade, become a crucial construct in marketing. Customer loyalty seems to be the appropriate concept for strategic management planning. Therefore, many marketers and organizations are trying to build and maintain customer loyalty which is a main concern for them. They are not only interested in how to make the sales but also focused on how to achieve the long term benefits through maintaining customer loyalty. It is because they are strongly believe that customer loyalty offers several benefits such as it creates entry barriers for competing brands; makes it possible to charge higher prices; gives the company time to react on competitors innovations; and also function as a buffer in times of intensive price-competition. By realizing the importance of consumer loyalty, thus students in the field of recreation and leisure have paid growing attention to loyalty-related issues in recent decades.
Loyalty is the dependent variable in the current research. There are two possible ways to conceptualize customer loyalty which are behavioural loyalty and attitudinal loyalty....